Exporting everything from GoodLinks, and what actually comes out

GoodLinks is one of the better-built reading apps on the Mac and iPhone: a clean save-and-read queue, real highlighting, and enough Shortcuts automation that MacStories has written it up twice. None of that is in question here. What this covers is narrower: what actually comes out of GoodLinks when you want a copy of your own saved links, and what the honest limits of that are.

The short version is that GoodLinks documents two export routes clearly, on its own site, and a third one that its own help pages do not mention at all, even though independent reports from people who have used it agree it exists. Worth separating the two kinds of claim rather than blending them, so this covers each in turn.

What does GoodLinks actually let you export?

Two things, according to GoodLinks' own release notes and site. The first is a single saved article: open it and you can export it to PDF, copy it as plain text, or copy it as Markdown. The second is your highlights, added in GoodLinks 2: export the highlights and notes from an article as Markdown, using a template you can customise yourself. That highlight export is also wired into Shortcuts, as an Export Highlights action, and into GoodLinks' own API, so it can run without opening the app by hand each time.

Both routes are part of the ordinary one-time purchase. GoodLinks Premium, described on its own Premium page, is an optional subscription that only gates features released after your first year of ownership. Since article and highlight export already existed when this was checked, buying GoodLinks today includes both, with nothing further to pay.

How do you export a single article and its highlights?

1. Open the saved link in GoodLinks. Article export works from the reading view of one link at a time, not as a bulk action across the library.
2. Use the article's action menu to choose PDF, plain text or Markdown. Each produces a standalone copy of that one article, formatted for whichever you picked.
3. For highlights specifically, export them from the same article. This writes out only the passages you marked, run through the export template set in GoodLinks' settings, as Markdown.
4. To automate it, use the Export Highlights action in Shortcuts. Useful if highlights are meant to land somewhere else automatically, in a notes app for example, rather than being copied out by hand each time.

How do you get your whole library out of GoodLinks?

This is where the trail runs thinner. GoodLinks' own FAQ, help pages and release notes describe the two routes above and nothing that covers every saved link in one file. Search for how people have actually moved their whole GoodLinks library elsewhere, though, and the same answer turns up independently more than once: on the Mac app, a File menu Export Data command writes the account's links out as a single JSON file, carrying at least each link's URL, its tags, the date it was added and whether it was starred.

Treat that as reported rather than confirmed. It comes from people who have actually done it, not from a GoodLinks help page saying so, and this piece could not find an official write-up to point at instead. What is unclear from the outside is whether that JSON also carries the full saved text of each article the way the reading view shows it, or only the link-level details above. If moving a GoodLinks library matters to you, the safe approach is the same either way: run the export yourself, open the resulting file, and check with your own eyes what is in it before trusting it as your only copy.

Is GoodLinks still the right tool for you?

For genuine reading, yes, and this is worth saying plainly rather than as a token gesture on the way to a pitch. GoodLinks strips ads and clutter from a saved page, keeps a real reading queue, syncs through your own iCloud account rather than a company's servers, and now has proper highlighting with export attached to it. If what fills your GoodLinks library is mostly things you actually intend to read, a well-made reading app with no subscription forced on you is exactly the right tool, and none of the above is a reason to leave it.

Where the rest of what you saved belongs

Not everything that gets saved into a reading app was ever going to be read start to finish. Some of it is reference: a product page, a piece of packaging, a layout worth remembering, kept because of what was on the page rather than for the words on it. GoodLinks was not built for that half, on purpose. It is a reading app, and a genuinely good one, not a place to browse a grid of things you saved.

That is the gap Muse sits in rather than competes for. It is a visual library on your Mac, a grid of what you kept rather than a queue of what to read, and it has no reading mode at all, so it makes no attempt to replace what GoodLinks already does well. Worth being just as plain about Muse's own limit here: like a GoodLinks link once the source page disappears, Muse does not archive the article behind a saved link either. What survives is the preview, title, tags and any note you added, not a stored copy of the page. Muse also has no dedicated GoodLinks importer, so links worth keeping move across by hand, pasted in one at a time, with Muse pulling its own preview for each.

Export it either way

None of this depends on planning to leave GoodLinks. Exporting a highlight file, or checking that Export Data still runs and produces a file you can open, costs a few minutes and answers a question worth having answered before the day it actually matters. Pocket's shutdown in 2025 is the reminder of what happens when nobody checked until it was too late: years of saved reading, and no working export left to run.